Letter of the Day | The magnificence of Dolly Parton

THE EDITOR, Madam:

A confession: I was a latecomer to appreciating Dolly Parton. While I have always been a lover of classic country music, her drag-queen costume of rhinestones, wigs and surgical enhancements was off-putting to a person who had not delved more deeply into Parton as a serious artiste. But, over the past decade, I became a late-blooming fan of the original multi-hyphenate force of nature that was Dolly Parton.

While Ms Parton was a musician who wrote 3,000 songs, her masterpieces, like the greatest songs of the genre, were studies in great truth written with the greatest economy.

Parton’s contemporary, Jimmy Webb, who just turned 80, wrote Wichita Lineman expressly for Glen Campbell. The song, a feature film compressed into three minutes and five seconds, described the existential angst of a solitary man surrounded by the vast landscape of the Great Plains who longs for someone that he “need(s) ... more than wants.”

Parton, in her Coat of Many Colors, transformed the story of growing up in poverty into an ode of love for her mother, a biblically inspired parable of overcoming shame and embracing the inner beauty of that garment sewn from scraps. As she wrote, “one is only poor if they choose to be”.

Her timeless ballad, Jolene, in one soul-rending line, is the plea of a woman who fears losing her man to a beautiful rival: “Please don’t take him, even though you can.” It’s a lyric that induces chills in anyone who has loved and lost. And perhaps Parton’s greatest song, I Will Always Love You, of 1974, was as much her mature leave-taking from someone she deeply cared for as it was a declaration of self-liberation.

What it took Jane Austen and Edith Wharton to achieve in 400-page novels, Dolly Parton could capture in 30 lines. But while Dolly was a genius as a singer-songwriter, like some of our greatest creative spirits, she was herself a work of art, like Andy Warhol, David Bowie and Michael Jackson.

Dolly’s persona was both authentic and deliberate; a synthesis that in anyone else might have been an elaborate “stage act”, but in Parton it was the real thing.

Before Madonna, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, Parton innovated the idea of a woman as the universal entrepreneur, becoming a movie star, creating a business empire and humanitarian enterprises that advanced literacy and healthcare for millions while supporting the communities she came up in, as one of 12 children whose childhood home was a log cabin without electricity or running water in Sevier County, Tennessee.

Before the multibillion-dollar phenomenon of ‘Swiftonomics’, Dolly Parton created Dollywood, a business dynamo that currently generates US$1.8 billion in economic activity in east Tennessee, employing 23,000 people.

Dolly Parton is, for me and millions of her fans around the world, a hero because not only did she survive against all odds, she triumphed and made of her success a thing of beauty.

Bob Marley and Dolly, born within a year of one another and both growing up in poverty, made universal poetry of their lives in the green hills and towns of their native lands, and, in doing so, changed the world.

Like Marley, Parton was an old soul, a great soul and a moral exemplar because of the profound generosity of her spirit and her vision. She embodied the Biblical concept of “lovingkindness”.

On accepting the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022, Dolly Parton said: “I never know what I’m going to do or why I’m going to do it. I just see a need and, if I can fill it, then I will.”

Requiescat in pace, Dolly, we will never fill your bedizened, fringed cowboy boots, but we must try.

ERIC RADACK

Santa Fe